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This is turnstile No. 602 in Fare Control Area R238, at one of the entries to the Grand Central–42nd Street subway station. It looks about the same as every other one in the subway system, but it has a special distinction: It’s probably the hardest-working turnstile in the city.

This turnstile is at the bottom of the escalators as you come down from Grand Central Terminal, directly ahead, the literal path of least resistance. Its three arms — known as the tripod — spun forward more than a million and a half times in 2023, recording 831,500 swipes and over 759,000 taps, and presumably made about the same number of turns as people exited. That’s about 3 million turns per year. (Or, to be precise about it, one-third turns, back and forth.)

They are obviously built to last, and, he notes with some pride, have vastly outlived their design expectations: “One of the testaments is just how many sheer cycles they do without failure, without maintenance,” he says. “I mean, those things can turn hundreds of thousands of times without a maintainer even needing to do anything.” He points out that the pressure required to pass through the tripod is quite light. “It’s just so well-balanced mechanically that the load on it is very low, and when you use it, it spins very easily. It’s not like you are pushing hard or anything to make the turnstile rotate. The simple actions of the solenoid and the fact that you just don’t have a lot of wear on components there — that’s really what gives it such a great life in the system. Some of those turnstiles have probably been out there over 30 years now.”

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The Police Department, which has 36,000 officers dedicated to enforcing the law, was even less help. After decades of aggressive tactics related to marijuana, the state had taken a new approach to cannabis that was explicitly designed to decriminalize recreational use and move enforcement away from the police.

Mayor Eric Adams has argued that has left the department without the authority it needs to police the shops, and some Democrats wary of reviving those rough bygone days are insistent on keeping it that way.

But Ms. Brewer was a member of another bloc that believed City Hall could be pushing more aggressively. It remains a crime to possess marijuana with the intention to sell without a license. The police seem content to let business go on uninterrupted."

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The Lamborghini of accommodation is Prestige: cabins for two that are 50 percent larger than the standard ones, with a mini fridge, an ensuite that includes a shower, and seating that turns into a double bed. Oh, and concierge service. The price would be a start on the down payment for that Lamborghini: $13,500 for two in high season, one way. Bookings for 2024 are already strong.

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Akhtar has a close friend (a creative executive) who has been using artificial intelligence to write scripts for the last six months. “I read a script they had outputted about two and a half months ago. It was hands-down the most compelling TV script I’ve read in a long time,” he said. Not because it was good, but because, he said, “It had my number in the same way that the iPhone has my number. I was turning the pages even though I had no real understanding of why I cared.”

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broken windows 2.0

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A few months ago, they were on vacation at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware; at dinner one night, an intoxicated woman around Fred’s age came up to their table with a group of her friends and asked him, “Is this your daughter?” “I turned to her and I said, ‘You don’t have to be mean about it,’” Jane recalled. “Then she went, ‘This is disgusting. You should be ashamed of yourselves. She’s way too young for you.’” Her friends had to pull her away. Jane went into the bathroom and cried. She felt as though she’d been “slut-shamed,” she said. “I feel so confident this is love,” she told me, “and like I’m doing the right thing by finding love in any place.”

Our judgments can also reflect our personal histories. If you worry men won’t find you desirable as you age, seeing DiCaprio with his latest model girlfriend might feel like confirmation of that. Sometimes we instinctively dislike what other people do just because it’s different from what we have chosen for ourselves.

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the exclamation point on the end of the internal-combustion era

“Do you need art?” he said. “Or music? Hypercars are like the culmination of all human disciplines, like art, design, science. . . . For me, it’s a celebration of human ingenuity in its most beautiful form.”

Burton and I looked at three Koenigseggs on the lot, all belonging to one Swiss family. Each car’s finish had been upgraded with a proprietary super-lightweight material called Koenigsegg Naked Carbon, or K.N.C. These three cars were, I discovered, the only ones in the world finished with K.N.C. The upgrade had reduced the weight of each car by forty-four pounds. (A car’s performance is roughly determined by its horsepower-to-weight ratio.) The special finish cost four hundred thousand dollars. For that amount, you could buy a Rolls-Royce Ghost, or a typically priced house in Houston. 

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One definition of a hypercar is a vehicle that nobody needs. Most have theoretical top speeds approaching or exceeding 300 m.p.h., which is much faster than Formula 1 cars, whose top speeds are about 220 m.p.h. Many hypercars also accelerate faster than Formula 1 cars. Hypercars, though, are ostensibly manufactured for the road. (A few models are designated as track-only.) Except for Germany’s autobahn, which has no speed limit, there are few public highways where one can use more than a fraction of a hypercar’s power. To some motoring aficionados, driving a hypercar is like crushing a nut with a diamond-encrusted sledgehammer. “They are trophies, big-game hunter’s trophies,” Mikey Harvey, the editor of the car magazine The Road Rat, told me recently. “They have little or no engineering value, or aesthetic value, or, frankly, functional value. But they are rare. And they are king of the hill. And every one is a little bit faster than the last one. They’re all so completely, undrivably fast on the road. If you take any of those cars anywhere near the outer limits of their performance envelope, you should get a long custodial sentence. . . . I don’t get it. I just think it’s appealing to the very worst of us.”

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A propensity for obesity is encoded in certain people’s genes. More than 70 genes correlated with obesity are already known, though the presence or absence of an obesity gene does not forecast a child’s future body shape. Nevertheless, the biggest known predictor of whether a child will develop obesity is if her parents have it; there is a 40 percent likelihood with one parent and an 80 percent likelihood with two. The question is which environmental factors (and in which combinations and at what levels of intensity) turn the genes “on.” 

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So it should come as no surprise that the state cannot be counted upon to demonstrate a commitment to human values. It has an artificial life of its own, even as it acts through us—when we are asked to kill in wartime, we are granted leave from human values. States are “persons without scruples,” Runciman notes, and we have had hundreds of years to grow familiar with this contrivance and its discontents. The machine-learning era is, in some sense, merely an extension of the mechanical one. “Let’s not kid ourselves that the age of AI—with the looming challenges of black-box decision-making and algorithmic procedures whose outcomes are a mystery even to their creators—poses a unique challenge for human understanding. Just look at your own life. Do you fully understand where the group decisions come from that shape who you are?,” Runciman writes. “The fact that groups are made out of people doesn’t make them any easier to see inside than other kinds of machines. The black boxes are all around us already. In one sense, at least, they are us.”

One of the things that make the machine of the capitalist state work is that some of its powers have been devolved upon other artificial agents—corporations. Where Runciman compares the state to a general A.I., one that exists to serve a variety of functions, corporations have been granted a limited range of autonomy in the form of what might be compared to a narrow A.I., one that exists to fulfill particular purposes that remain beyond the remit or the interests of the sovereign body. Corporations can thus be set up in free pursuit of a variety of idiosyncratic human enterprises, but they, too, are robotic insofar as they transcend the constraints and the priorities of their human members. The failure mode of governments is to become “exploitative and corrupt,” Runciman notes. The failure mode of corporations, as extensions of an independent civil society, is that “their independence undoes social stability by allowing those making the money to make their own rules.” There is only a “narrow corridor”—a term Runciman borrows from the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson—in which the artificial agents balance each other out, and citizens get to enjoy the sense of control that emerges from an atmosphere of freedom and security. The ideal scenario is, in other words, a kludgy equilibrium.

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Runciman’s basic argument, which unfolds in the elegantly shaggy manner of a Peripatetic seminar, is that the alignment problem is not in fact an anomaly, and that the coming singularity might best be historicized as the Second Singularity. Runciman identifies a precedent and an analogy for the alignment problem in our relationship to two other artificial agencies: the state and the corporation. This idea, in his account, first emerged in 1651, when Thomas Hobbes described the Leviathan as, in Runciman’s words, “a kind of robot.” Hobbes, of course, didn’t call it a robot—a term that first appeared in the nineteen-twenties—but he did elaborate his vision of the state as an “Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended.” As Runciman glosses the concept, “We assemble it in the same way we might construct any other machine of moving parts. This one is designed to resemble its creators. But it can do things we cannot. It is much more powerful than we are. That’s why we built it in the first place.” The state has the supra-human advantages of durability and reliability, and serves as a means of coördination.

Runciman continues, “The Leviathan is not a problem-solving machine, like a smartphone. It is a decision-making mechanism, like a set of dice. It might not give you the right answer—it will simply give you an answer.” In theory, these answers reflect the will of the polity. “But because it comprises people,” he writes, “once the people get better at coming up with answers, the state should too. These dice can think for themselves.”